José SIdenei de Melo |
quinta-feira, 13 de agosto de 2015
Windows 10 – nota 10. -
American Standard’s SaTo: A Safe Toilet
| Wed, 08/12/2015 - 7:00am Lindsay Hock, Editor
Every Wednesday, R&D Magazine will feature a R&D 100 Flashback, chosen from our R&D 100 archive of winners. This week’s flashback is American Standard’s SaTo, which won a R&D 100 Award in 2014. Lack of safe sanitation facilities causes 2,000 deaths/day worldwide, mostly among children. American Standard set out to help save these lives with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Challenge to develop and test a low-cost, pre-fabricated toilet system for use in developing countries. The SaTo—derived from “safe toilet”—is a cost-effective, sanitary toilet pan designed for use in Bangladesh, where most people use non-hygienic open pit latrines to defecate. Q: Briefly describe your winning technology. A: American Standard invented the SaTo (derived from Safe Toilet) sanitary toilet pan in 2013 to help reduce disease transmission, provide safe sanitation facilities and improve quality of life for residents of Bangladesh, who were defecating using open pit latrines. This cost-effective SaTo toilet pan used ingeniously simple mechanical and water seals with a trap-door mechanism to close off pit latrines from the open air, thereby preventing flying insects from spreading pathogens from contact with human waste. Use of the SaTo pan allowed residents to continue “flushing” their waste using their traditional bodna container of water. Q: What made your winning technology better than what already existed? A: On a 2013 research trip to Bangladesh, the product design team observed the widespread use of non-hygienic latrines, where users fill a pot with water and use this to “flush” waste into the pit. The latrines were covered with a concrete slab in which a plastic toilet pan was encased. The pans had a large opening that allowed waste to fall through, but no seal to prevent transmission of pathogens back out of the pit via flying insects. The SaTo pan effectively and simply sealed off the latrine pits, while allowing residents to maintain their regular bathroom practices. Q: How important was your winning technology to its end application? A: The winning technology proved to be a highly successful solution to a serious health issue. Field tests, and subsequent permanent installations, garnered extremely positive feedback by users. The SaTo pan was easy to use, effective at reducing disease transmission, reduced occurrence of illness in children and virtually eliminated the strong latrine odor. Since the SaTo pans were designed to accommodate existing cultural and sanitation practices, their acceptance was widespread throughout the communities. By working with an established local manufacturer, the $1.85 SaTo pan cost made them attainable for a population surviving on less than $1.00 per day.
SaTo. Image: American StandardQ: Have you changed your winning product since you won the R&D 100 Award? A: The model designed for Bangladesh hasn’t changed, and has received very positive reviews from the thousands of families that received the SaTo toilet pans. American Standard has developed a new SaTo model for use by low-income households in Sub-Saharan Africa. In many areas, such as rural Malawi and Uganda, both water and concrete—two key components in the original SaTo design—are scarce or expensive. Plus, alternate pan designs are being crafted to accommodate both squatting and sitting postures for use in this part of the world. These new-model SaTo toilet pans will incorporate local Sub-Saharan Africa bathroom practices, just as the original SaTo pan did in Bangladesh, with the goal of improving sanitation facilities without requiring a change in behavior. Q: What value did winning an R&D 100 Award provide to you and your organization? A: Winning this R&D 100 Award provided very real and meaningful validation that this seemingly humble product was well researched, thoughtfully designed and carried the potential to improve quality of life and provide dignity for people globally. This recognition supports the cause of global sanitation, providing much-needed attention to a critical health issue facing nearly 40% of the world population. The accolades for the SaTo toilet pan has helped it to be embraced by NGOs including BRAC, WaterAid and Save the Children and increased its distribution in other parts of the world, including Haiti, Malawi, Uganda and the Philippines. . http://www.rdmag.com/articles/2015/08/american-standards-sato-safe-toilet
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Casca de tangerina: benefícios para a saúde
| 29 January 2015 | Por Bruna Guarnieri Bruna Guarnieri Redatora de ConteúdoA maioria das pessoas adora comer tangerina, mas acaba jogando a maior parte dos seus benefícios no lixo. Isso mesmo, a casca de tangerina possui muito mais benefícios do que a fruta em si, que são capazes de fazer maravilhas pela saúde. De acordo com um estudo conjunto do Departamento de Agricultura dos EUA e uma empresa de pesquisa canadense, publicado em 2004, há relatos de que a casca de tangerina possui propriedades para baixar o colesterol. Segundo estudiosos, casca tem mais propriedades medicinais do que a fruta em si. Foto: iStock, Getty Images Casca de tangerina previne câncerAlém disso, a casca de tangerina é muito aromática e tem um sabor picante e amargo. Mas, quando comparada à fruta, a casca tem mais antioxidantes e flavonoides, que podem prevenir o câncer e melhorar a eficácia da vitamina C no organismo. Ainda, o óleo essencial de tangerina pode proporcionar muitos benefícios e qualidade de vida. A maneira mais fácil de consumir a casca de tangerina é fazer um pó com ela. Para isso, é preciso simplesmente secar as cascas, ao natural, deixando-as em local seco, ou então no próprio forno. Após as cascas estarem secas, você pode moê-las em um moedor de café e armazenar o seu pó na geladeira, o que irá preservar as suas propriedades saudáveis. Por que usar a casca de tangerinaApesar de não ter gosto de coisa alguma, pode ser adicionado em sucos ou em água. Você também pode preparar um chá usando a casca de tangerina, nesse modo com ela fresca ou seca. Veja quais são os principais benefícios deste remédio caseiro para a saúde. 1.Baixar o colesterol Um estudo científico publicado em 2004 revela que a casca, conforme dito acima, tem benefícios à saúde mais poderosos do que o suco feito da fruta, logo, poderia ter um potencial significativo de redução do colesterol. Os cientistas deram a hamsters uma dieta gordurosa e, em seguida, os roedores foram alimentados com essa casca por 35 dias ininterruptos. Ao final do período, os pesquisadores descobriram que os hamsters alimentados com suplementos de tangerina tiveram o seu colesterol reduzido, e tudo isso sem efeitos colaterais negativos. 2.Luta contra o câncer Um estudo britânico de 2007 mostrou que certos compostos encontrados em abundância na casca podem causar um efeito de autodestruição nas células cancerosas. Os resultados preliminares indicam que pacientes com câncer podem se beneficiar ao tomar um suplemento de tangerina. Por enquanto os ensaios clínicos não foram realizados, mas não há dúvida de que a evidência é promissora. 3.Obesidade Os estudos sobre os efeitos de um composto encontrado naturalmente nas porções brancas da casca de tangerina mostraram que ratinhos que foram tratados com este elemento não conseguiram desenvolver obesidade ou aterosclerose. Aterosclerose refere-se ao acúmulo de gordura nas artérias, que podem levar a um ataque cardíaco ou acidente vascular cerebral. Outros benefíciosMédicos chineses recomendam o uso desta casca especialmente na preparação de chá. A lista de benefícios para a saúde inclui auxílio na digestão e aliviar náuseas em mulheres grávidas. Outros benefícios incluem balanceamento de açúcar no sangue, ativando a desintoxicação do fígado, o tratamento de gripes e resfriados e aliviar o stress.
http://doutissima.com.br/2015/01/29/casca-de-tangerina-beneficios-para-saude-14689840/
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Searching the Internet inflates estimates of internal knowledge
Working in groups is advantageous because different individuals can be responsible for different information, allowing each individual to develop more in-depth expertise. For instance, a plumber, electrician, and carpenter work together to build a house, but each is responsible for unique aspects of the project. This is an example of a transactive memory system: information is distributed across the group, and each group member is aware of what he or she knows, as well as who knows what.Because the Internet surpasses any person in accessibility, speed, and breadth of knowledge, the Internet may be treated as an all-knowing expert transactive memory partner. However, in a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Fisher, Goddu, and Keil (2015) suggest that these same features may exacerbate potentially negative effects of transactive memory, in particular conflating knowledge for which a partner is responsible with knowledge one actually possesses. Each of the experiments had an induction phase followed by a self-assessment phase. In the induction phase, participants rated their ability to explain the answers to common questions (e.g., "How do zippers work?") after either searching the Internet to confirm their explanation, or being specifically instructed not to use the Internet. In the subsequent self-assessment phase, participants were asked to rate how well they could explain the answers to groups of questions from a variety of domains that were unrelated to the induction phase questions. Participants who searched the Internet in the induction phase rated themselves as being able to give better explanations than participants who were not allowed to search the Internet. This result was obtained even when participants in the Internet condition were given a specific web source to find (e.g., "Please search the scientificamerican.com page for this information") and participants in the no Internet condition were shown text from that same website. In other words, searching for explanations online led to increases in self-assessed knowledge even when both groups had access to the same explanatory content, and when Internet search did not involve effortful processes like choosing between sources. Higher self-assessed knowledge was also observed following unsuccessful Internet searches (e.g., searches that did not yield an answer to the question). Increases in self-assessed knowledge following Internet search were reduced or eliminated in the following conditions: 1) when participants were provided with a link to access the web source in the induction phase, and 2) when autobiographical knowledge was probed in the self-assessment phase. These results suggest that it is the act of searching online that promotes increases in self-assessed knowledge, and this effect is limited to domains where the Internet might plausibly be of use. Together, this series of experiments demonstrates that actively searching the Internet inflates our sense of the knowledge we actually possess because we fail to recognize the extent to which we rely on external sources for information. While similar illusions of knowledge have been obtained for other external information sources, these illusions may be particularly strong for the Internet because online information is easily and nearly constantly accessible, is retrieved quickly, and covers an incredible breadth of content. Such access to information has many benefits, but the authors caution that the strength of the illusion of knowledge with respect to the Internet could have negative consequences in situations in which the Internet is not available, and individuals think they know more than they really do. Story Source: The above post is reprinted from materials provided by American Psychological Association. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. Journal Reference:
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